The need for text editors may not be apparent to the Web novice who primarily works as a designer or who favors WYSIWYG Web design suites. The fact is, BBEdit provides a host of features for editing HTML (or other code) that utilities like Apple's SimpleText or Microsoft's NotePad can't match. These features include contextual viewing of code, such as colorizing HTML tags separately from content text, complex find-replace functions, line numbering, pull-down menu utilities for "dropping in" most HTML tags, spell checking, and much more.

Many Web site designs, particularly those developed using nested tables, are difficult for WYSIWYG suites like Macromedia Dreamweaver or Adobe GoLive to work with, and the only choice is to work with the raw HTML to make everything line up properly. Similarly, once you become proficient with HTML tags, it can actually be faster to build a basic page or template by simply typing the code by hand, particularly in BBEdit, which offers a number of built-in tools for quickly building HTML.

The difference between a true text editor like BBEdit vs. a word processor like Microsoft Word is that BBEdit works with pure ASCII text. In a word processing application, almost every element other than words is an embedded command. For instance, in Word, you don't actually place bullets into your document; you place a command for a bullet. Additionally, a word processor embeds codes to keep track of font sizes, typefaces, colors, and line spacing. This works fine for word processing, but doesn't work at all for programming. A Web browser understands an ASCII equivalent like "•" as a bullet, but won't understand the code that Word uses.

While this is somewhat catastrophic for HTML, it is even more so if you need to edit a configuration file for a Perl cgi-script running on a Web server. A word processor can introduce formatting and line breaks that don't exist in the original file, and, once edited, it becomes corrupted with various word processor coding, which a Web server wouldn't understand. In this case, a pure text editor like BBEdit must be used.

BBEdit 6.0 has kept all of its primary features intact, while adding some wonderful enhancements. The most visible improvement is the code editing window, which now provides more color choices for elements. For instance, a tag will be in one color, while the attribute shows in another color, and the value will be in yet another color, such as <P align="center"> where the <P> is the paragraph tag, the align is the attribute, and "center" is the value. This greatly improves readability and allows quick checking of syntax for missing closing tags or quotes. This alone is worth the upgrade cost for me.

Also new is enhanced find-replace with added filtering and the ability to save filter criteria. This is much better than the "never ending" folder menu in version 5.1, which quickly became cluttered with every folder ever used in a find-replace operation. BBEdit's multiple file search and editing functions have always been one of its hallmark features, and are invaluable on complex Web projects where one doesn't use server side and includes (SSI) for managing common elements across pages. For example, using multiple file find-replace you could easily update copyright footers on all site pages, within separate folders, in one operation with various confirmation options.

Preset HTML tools in BBEdit, which aid in starting to build a page, now include tags for WML (Wireless Markup Language), and XHTML. This is important because XHTML will be the "next big thing" for Web developers to use as an eventual transition to XML, and WML tags make conversion of select pages for the "wireless Web" far simpler. Enhanced Tag Marker and Edit Tag commands allow you to add menu options you may use that don't exist in BBEdit's tag options.

For AppleScript junkies, every action in BBEdit is now recordable and attachable, and any BBEdit menu command can be replaced or augmented by a script. This is very powerful because many programmers add functionality to BBEdit through plug-ins, and this will allow more functionality to be added by third parties quickly and easily.

One of my favorite, and most requested additions, is multiple clipboards. Often in HTML programming, we re-use many small pieces of code across pages, such as SSI calls, or JavaScript pieces, which tie in to a main piece of code in the of a document. Now, you can keep these bits active without having to copy-paste over and over again from multiple documents. (Note: I was going to add a "woo hoo!" here, but my editors want me to cut down on using that phrase repeatedly when I genuinely like a product.)

New Apple QuickTime support allows viewing of movies and translatable image files without leaving BBEdit. Enhanced preview capability provides for viewing a document in all running browsers simultaneously.

Finally, new international text support lets you edit documents in any left-to-right script system supported on the Mac, including Chinese and Japanese. BBEdit can also read and write Unicode files. There are many more enhancements, bug fixes, and additions, but these are the highlights.

BBEdit has always been well-documented and version 6.0 is even better. In addition to a well-written 321-page paperback manual with more than 120 screen shots, online help within the application is more extensive and doesn't send you to the Web when you need to know something.

I encountered only one error with BBEdit 6.0, which was related to the Comment/Uncomment menu command (which I use often), and provoked a "missing preference error." I expect there will be a 6.01 update to fix this any moment now, but otherwise, the program is stable and has not crashed after two weeks of daily heavy use.

And the only missing feature that remains on my wish list is the ability to send CHMOD permissions via the FTP tool. The FTP download/upload facility in BBEdit is very useful and includes the ability to see hidden files (like .htaccess) on a remote Web server, but the ability to set permissions (CHMOD 755) on a cgi-script once uploaded would add tremendous functionality without taking away from dedicated FTP applications. Of course, with the extensible nature of BBEdit 6.0, I'm certain somebody (if not the publisher) will address this.

BBEdit is much more than an HTML editor, and is often mislabeled as such. It can also be used to read/write CodeWarrior files for easy editing and programming of Macintosh applications, and has support for many popular tag-based environments like ColdFusion and Active Server Pages. It has been, and remains, the best choice for pure text editing and raw HTML coding on the Macintosh. And, as Bare Bones' registered trademark declares: "It doesn't suck."

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